Dr Lydia Assouad

Dr Lydia Assouad is an Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics, International Development Department and a research affiliate at the World Inequality Lab. Her research lies at the intersection of political economy, development economics and economic history, with a particular focus on the Middle East. She is interested in studying the determinants of social cohesion in societies divided along major ethno-religious, political or economic lines. In a first research agenda, she analyses the dynamics of income and wealth inequality in the region. Her second research agenda explores the consequences of nation-building policies.

Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, Quartz. She also worked as a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Middle East program) in 2019-2020. She holds a PhD and an MA from the Paris School of Economics and a BA from Ecole Normale Supérieure and Sorbonne University in France.

Selected publications

• Measuring Inequality in the Middle East, 1990-2016: The World's Most Unequal Region?, with Facundo Alvaredo and Thomas Piketty, Review of Income and Wealth, 2019, vol. 65, p.685-711
  
  
• Extreme Inequality: Evidence from Brazil, India, the Middle-East and South Africa, with Lucas Chancel and Marc Morgan, American Economic Association: Papers & Proceedings, 2018, vol. 108, p. 119-123
  
  
• Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities in Algeria, Iraq, and Turkey, 1990-2019, with Amory Gethin, Thomas Piketty, Juliet-Nil Uraz, in Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities. A Study of 50 Democracies, 1950-2020, edited by Amory Gethin, Clara Martinez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty, Harvard University Press, 2021

Expertise

Political economy of development; inequality and taxation; state and nation-building; culture and institutions; Middle East